


the meadow where i left you

by ineachandeveryway



Category: SKAM (Italy)
Genre: College Talk, F/M, Post-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-14
Updated: 2020-01-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:00:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22258345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ineachandeveryway/pseuds/ineachandeveryway
Summary: Everything he does is so tender and it kills her. The way his fingers sift gently through her hair, the way his arm rests at the small of her back, the way his nose touches hers and slips softly past.“I’m not insecure,” Ele whispers, voice shaking. “I’m lonely. I’m lonely and I don’t want to let you go.”/ Or, Edoardo convinces Eleonora to stay in Italy.
Relationships: Edoardo Incanti/Eleonora Sava
Comments: 8
Kudos: 74





	the meadow where i left you

**Author's Note:**

> Personally, I don't think Edo would ask Ele to move to Ithaca for him. He knows how precious her friends and family are to her, and I doubt he'd ask her to leave that only to potentially end up lonely and unhappy while he's out building his education and career. I just decided to connect that sentiment to some ideas I have about his mother, too. 
> 
> I am also a little confused by his admissions letter to Cornell. It doesn't make sense to receive a letter that late if he applied for a fall admission, so I assumed here that he applied for a spring one, and that this fic takes place sometime in December. Lastly, comments are appreciated, as always. 
> 
> Title taken from ["Meadow Song"](https://genius.com/S-carey-meadow-song-lyrics) by S. Carey.

The idea of doing long-distance doesn’t scare her at first. 

Edoardo is a menace, and he wakes her up every morning with a five-text minimum slew, cooks her breakfast on weekends and picks her up late at night to drop her responsibly at Filo’s doorstep. Eleonora figures that, time difference aside, the next four years are not an impossible hurdle. 

Just a few blips in the timeline. Nothing more than that. 

But then Silvia texts her to ask about his admission, and there’s an onslaught of questions from her that come every day after that, like where will he live, who will he live with, how often will he come home, will he come home at all? So many questions that just poison her brain until the day she’s finally stood in his house with the boxes nearly packed up around her, and Ele realizes she has _doubts._

Edo’s in the kitchen scouring the best of his nonna’s recipes, and she wonders whether to broach the topic at this point would be cruel, because she loves the peace in him when he’s thinking about his nonna. Everything is going right in their lives, and she doesn’t want to ruin these last days with her frets and fears. 

A few weeks ago, he took her to a bookshop in Pigneto and they laid out a map of New York City together: Harlem, the Bronx, Ithaca, all cluttered up in this small space of so many people, and she wondered at the size of it and how a person like Edoardo might fit. 

Their neighborhood in Roma is by no means small, but there’s a quiet to the streets and scenery that she doesn’t think he’ll find where he’s going. Not that Edoardo has ever been one to thrive on the quiet, but she knows he enjoys the space of temporary silences. The thought of him waking up to raucous traffic each morning is foreign, both figuratively and literally. 

The thought of him waking up to it with her, less so. 

"Ele,” his voice echoes from the kitchen. “Come here and tell me which one of these I ought to take.” 

Eleonora releases a breath and gives the room a once-over. Her hands tremble slightly as she makes her way to him, but the picture she’s met with eases her nerves just a fraction. 

Edo sits lazily with his back to the cupboards, long legs splayed out, a dozen or so moleskines sprawled across the floor about him. His nonna refuses to let him take all of her treasures, for fear that he might lose them, so it’s come down to this decision of choosing one among all the rest. He peers at them, almost intensely concentrated. 

“Hey.” She knocks on the wall. 

“I cannot decide between the _risotto_ ”—he holds up an olive moleskine, meeting her eyes as he tears his gaze from the pages—“and the _zuppe e salsa_.” Here he brandishes a red one, more worn down than the first. 

“You can’t take pictures of both?” Ele smiles. 

“If they were ten pages long, but the truth of the matter is a bit different, no?” He scrunches his nose and laughs before reaching for her hand. Eleonora watches him patiently, eyes shuttering once. Her lips part as they do when she can’t concentrate. 

“Something on your mind?” he asks, looking up at her. He rubs an inch of the fleece from her sweater-sleeve between his fingers. Ele crosses the small width of the kitchen and takes a seat in his lap, Edo’s arms curling around her like the action is second-nature. 

“I could cook for you,” she murmurs, gazing up at him from behind the curtain of her hair. “If you took me with you.” 

Edoardo blinks. 

A long look passes between them, no words, just quiet. It takes her hardly a second to realize he’s thought about this before. That he’s thought about it and hasn’t told her, because, because—?

Edo props up her chin with one hand and smiles. “I thought I was supposed to cook for you,” he jokes, all gentle. 

His fingers are light whispers on the underside of her jaw, and if he keeps at it, she won’t have an argument to make, because his touch reminds her of the way her mother used to hold her as a child, and it calms her and all of the senseless voices in her head. 

“I know, I just—” Eleonora falters. The ring on her finger becomes a sudden distraction, and she picks at it while searching for the right words to say. “A semester is a long time,” comes out quiet. 

Edoardo looks at her with genuine confidence and nods, unperturbed. “I know, but we can do it.” He holds her gaze for a moment, searching perhaps for the underlying meaning to her words. They’ve had time to discuss the logistics of all of this—what time of the day they’ll call each other, ticket pricing in case they visit each other, whether to invest more in Skype or in emails—but the emotional component has played a generally backseat role. 

Maybe because they’re scared, just a little. 

Edo squeezes her hand. “ _I_ can do it,” he says, “if that’s what you’re worried about.” His thumbs runs along the side of her finger, brushes the knuckle. Ele just blinks in surprise, completely unprepared for the admission, let alone the implications of it. Turning it over in her head makes her angry. 

“Edoardo Incanti, I am not as insecure as you think I am,” she parrots, lifting herself from his lap to go somewhere, anywhere. The effort is easily thwarted when she remembers he has his arms wrapped around her, and he holds her down tightly to him, smiling a bit mischievously as she turns to face him with a frown.

Filo’s always told her she looks cute when she’s upset, and loath though she may be to admit it, the observation is true. Edoardo looks like he could kiss the shit out of her if given the go-ahead. 

“I don’t mean to call you insecure.” He laughs. “But isn’t anyone, in our situation?”

Eleonora takes a deep breath, looks down and feels her eyes clouding. Her hair shields him from seeing her wipe a tear from the corner of her eye, but Edo pushes a lock back and curls it around his fingers. The laughter finally fades from his lips, and he reads the uncertainty in her eyes, reforming his expression to emulate a modicum of composure. “Hey, _hey_.”

Everything he does is so tender and it kills her. The way his fingers sift gently through her hair, the way his arm rests at the small of her back, the way his nose touches hers and slips softly past. 

“I’m not insecure,” Ele whispers, voice shaking. “I’m lonely. I’m lonely and I don’t want to let you go.” 

She remembers their conversation in his car all those months ago, how she told him all of the things she’d learned how to do herself growing up, how he’d taken over to do half of them for her before they were even a couple, because that was what pining after a person for so long signified.

It’s not that these are things that Filo or her mother or Eva or the rest of the girls can’t do. Her voice is a little louder now for her own benefit, and she knows how to ask for things when she needs them. Edoardo is just good in the sense that he never needs to ask. He reads her in a fraction of a second, and all of the answers are there. 

“Did I ever tell you why I applied to Cornell?” he asks suddenly. 

Eleonora blinks, shakes her head. She assumes anyone applies to an Ivy League school because they feel capable of taking on the gamble. 

Edo sags back against the cupboards a little. “I lived there, while my mother was receiving treatment. New York. The museums, the architecture, the street life. They fascinated me. I would spend every day canvassing a new destination, and at the end of the day I would go to her hospital bed and paint the pictures she couldn’t see, because she had to stay there. Poked and prodded by nurses and doctors, all of the time. 

“My father brought my mother there, and she wept to see her flowers. To see her streets and her people who made her.” Edo brings his hands around to rest them in her lap, and his eyes shutter and focus on the way their fingers tangle. “It was for her benefit, but it killed her, I think. To go someplace she could not see, could not connect to. 

“And I won’t say it’s the same, because it isn’t, but Ele, you would be so lonely.” He looks up at her, sadness encased so deeply in his eyes that it hurts her. She just wants to lean forward and wrap him up in her arms and never let go. “More lonely than you are here,” he insists, “surrounded by friends and family and familiarity.” 

Eleonora holds his face in her hands. “And you wouldn’t be?” 

“I _would_ ,” he admits, lilting the phrase a little more than usual. “But I would have my mother there, in my memory. And I would have all of the things that tied her to me before she died. And I would have you and Fede, in heart and mind.” Edo touches both places with one hand, then rocks forward and lets his nose kiss hers, smiling slightly. He can't ask her to tear herself away from this place, and it touches her. It breaks her heart, but it touches her. 

Ele shifts her thumbs under his eyes, follows the long line of his lashes as he holds his breath and lets her canvas the expanse of his skin. He feels a bit like one of her flowers in this moment. Tempered by the late afternoon shade, perched on the cusp of a bloom. Tender, tender. 

“We will be okay,” she breathes into his skin, lips pressed to his cheek. His arms encircle her again, hold her tight, and they sit like that on the kitchen floor, his nonna’s recipe books scattered all around them, boxes in the other room, sun setting outside as Friday comes to a close. 

Love is this place, this time, this memory. Love is the space between them that spans an ocean or a centimeter. Love is the way he looks at her and sees his mother like an echo. 

And they will be okay. 


End file.
